The Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Department of Landscape Architecture has announced the 2022 recipients of the Penny White Project Fund. Established in 1976 by the family of Winifred G. “Penny” White who died suddenly during her second year as a landscape architecture student at the GSD, the program offers financial support for student projects with the goal to “carry forward Penny’s ideal of a culture which emphasizes a close relationship between people and nature in a cohesive living environment.”
This year’s 18 winning proposals were selected through an evaluation process that looked for “originality and innovation of projects, with an eye to their contribution to pressing challenges related to the fields of design, landscape, urbanism, and ecology.” Awards typically range from $200 to $4,500.
“From the impact of animist relationships with plants in the cultivation of ecosystems in Hawai’i to the analysis of rest stops and their impact in the US highway culture and leisure travel, from the role of the Luganda language in the construction and preservation of landscapes in south central Uganda to the shared cultural values and practices in the transcontinental landscape of the Strait of Gibraltar, from a prototypical experiment on the use of lichen as air quality bioindicator in Mexico City to a film documentary on the abandonment of wartime manufacturing plants in Central China, this 45th edition of the Penny White Project Fund has awarded an extraordinary set of proposals,” remarks the Fund’s 2022 selection committee. “Working with a wide variety of geographic conditions and research methods, these projects constitute a great reflection on the many different ways that design contributes to a more just distribution of the world’s resources, and will help to expand the Penny White Project’s legacy towards a better understanding of the complexities of our contemporary environment.”
The following GSD degree candidates will receive Penny White project funding for 2022:
Catherine Auger (MLA I AP ’23) for “Noise1”
Matthew Gorab (MLA I ’23) for “Rest Stopping Across America: An Investigation of Northeast and Midwest Rest Stops”
Diana Guo (MLA I ’22) & Tianwei Li (MLA I ’22) for “Berries of Abundance: Renewing Lifeways Through Cultural Foodscapes in Arctic Canada”
Julia Hedges (MLA I ’24) for “Immaterial Earth: Kentucky Karst Above and Below”
Yazmine Mihojevich (MLA I ’23) for “Recovering Roger Young Village”
Dora Mugerwa (MLA I ’24) for “Luganda and the Land: How Language Reimagines Landscape”
Chandani Patel (MLA I AP ’23) for “Environmental Commoning in Loktak Lake, Manipur”
Marina Recio (MLA I ’22) for “Seeing Through Lichen: Making Air Pollution Visible in Mexico City”
Scarlet Rendleman (MLA I ’22) for “Animate Entanglements: Spiritual Ecologies of Native Hawai’ian Land-based Ethics and Practices”
Kevin Robishaw (MLA I ’23) for “Never the Same River Twice: Un-Damming and Re-Designing America’s Rivers”
Berit Schurke (MLA I ’22) for “Of Shifting Coastlines: Articulating Arctic Coastal Adaptation Strategies in Anticipation of the Deep Thaw”
Rebecca Shen (MLA I AP ‘23) for “Tending Sanctuary: Exploring Entanglements of Land Stewardship and Multispecies Community at Vine Sanctuary”
Liwei Shen (MLA I ’22) & Ying Zhang (MLA I ’22) for “Atlas of Post-Afforested Desert Landscape: An Ecological Study of the Mu Us Desert’s Greening Effort in China’s Three-North Shelter Forest Program”
Elaine Stokes (DDes ’24) for “Dammed Landscapes: Riparian Infrastructure at the Mississippi’s Headwaters”
Juan Villalon (MAUD ’22) & Kawthar Marafi (MLA I AP ’23) for “Aceituna/Zaytoon landscapes: Olive Tree Cultivation Atlas across the Trans-Gibraltar Region”
Erin Voss (MLA I ’23) for “The Implication of Cultural Seascapes for the Design and Management of Polynesian Islands”
Rachaya Wattanasirichaigoon (MAUD/MLA I AP ’24) for “The Lightscapes of Fireflies”
Sijia Zhong (MLA I AP ’22) for “Land the Void”